samesexinthecity: Joan Snyder and David Hockney

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Experiment Station

The Phillips Collection is proud to partner with @samesexinthecity to celebrate, honor, and examine Queer art during Pride and beyond. @samesexinthecity explores LGBTQ identity through works in the Phillips’s collection.

Joan Snyder, Savage Dreams, between 1981 and 1982, Oil, acrylic, and fabric on canvas, 66 x 180 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips in honor of Laughlin Phillips, 1992

Joan Snyder (b. 1940, Highland Park, NJ) first gained attention for her artwork in the 1970s, when she was outspokenly involved in the women’s movement, creating artworks that explored and deconstructed ideas of abstract expressionism, landing on an evolving style that played with pictorialism, incorporating words and letters and personal iconographies. Her artworks are in a number of museum collections, and she has been the recipient of several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974.

A vocal feminist, she did not publicly identify as a lesbian until 1980, after a time of confusion, a troubled marriage, and after evolving public success in the art world. In a 1995 interview with fellow artist Harmony Hammond, she noted that she was hesitant about being limited, saying, “Once I began to live honestly and openly, there wasn’t an issue. This was just one part of my life, so I don’t identify that way alone (as a lesbian artist).” However, her artwork is intensely personal, confessional even, incorporating gestural paint strokes, bright colors, and found objects to create a new language.

David Hockney, 1996, Three Men, Ink on paper, 40 3/8 x 29 in., The Phillips Collection, Bequest of June P. Carey, 1983

David Hockney (b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom) has established himself as one of the leading, versatile artists of the 20th century. Known for his prolific output of works of all mediums—experimenting with everything from acrylic paints, to stage designs, to collaged photography, and more—his explorations of queer life in the 1960s and 1970s remains key to our imagining of gay history at that time.

While doing postgraduate work at London’s Royal College of Art, he was inspired by the writing of Walt Whitman, creating works with titles such as “Erection” and “We Two Boys Together Clinging.” He was intrigued by the differences in response to queerness when he visited America for the first time in 1961, which alongside the easy-going lifestyle led him to move to the United States in 1964. After moving to California, he started painting colorful images, focusing on domestic scenes of men together, among sun-drenched pools and palm trees, showers and bathtubs, and bedrooms in bright, window-filled houses. His artwork was overt in his examination of the male body, blatantly sexual as he depicted gay desire, luxuriating in the white, male nude. In the early 70s, Hockney started double portraits of couples, such as writer Christopher Isherwood and painter Don Bachardy, and Henry Geldzhler and Christopher Scott—portrayals that captured public attention and remain today as key images of the 1970s gay, white scene on the West Coast.

Interested in seeing queer art and histories highlighted even further? Vist @samesexinthecity on Instagram for daily updates!

samesexinthecity: Charles Demuth & Francis Bacon

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Experiment Station

Charles Demuth, Eggplant, ca. 1922-ca. 1923, Watercolor over graphite pencil on paper, 12 1/8 x 18 1/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1924

Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (1883–1935) was an American painter who specialized in watercolors, working in a style now known as Precisionism. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall Academy and studied at Drexel Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Charles Demuth’s art is characterized by its sharp lines, crisp colors, and geometric shapes. He gained acclaim in his lifetime for his still lifes which focused on the bold colors and stark shapes of industrial landscapes, human figures, flowers, and vegetables, emphasizing the curves and lines of these forms. He is credited with being an artist who gave modernism an American form and face, and his influence can be felt in the works of his contemporaries and artists who followed him, such as Stuart Davis. His American modernism is today considered a forerunner to the later art movements of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism.

He is also credited today with depicting gay life in the early 1900s. Even in his lifetime, his artwork contained symbolic references to gay sexuality, and his watercolors and sketches reveal a lively gay scene in the early early 20th century. Many of these scenes featured the tearooms and bathhouses that he frequented, showing sailors and other men in erotic embraces.

Francis Bacon, Study of a Figure in a Landscape, 1952, Oil on canvas, 78 x 54 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1955 © The Estate of Francis Bacon

An artist who borrowed and played with themes and imagery from old masters and his contemporaries, Francis Bacon’s artworks today are instantly recognizable for his distinctive, almost surreal style. Violent and distorted, his paintings share themes of war, trauma, and seem to contain seething, roiling emotions. His choice of subject matter—painfully contorted, screaming bodies, crucifixions—reflects the violence and trauma that characterized 20th-century Europe, but also reflects his keen interest in depicting male homosexuality and sadomasochism. He created a number of works that depicted men in various states of intimacy, and though they sometimes caused a scandal, his works today are considered important ruminations on same-sex desire, mess and pain included.

Interested in seeing queer art and histories highlighted even further? Vist @samesexinthecity on Instagram for daily updates!

Why queer art and artists?

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Experiment Station

The Phillips Collection is proud to partner with @samesexinthecity to celebrate, honor, and examine queer art during Pride and beyond. Here, @samesexinthecity discusses what is at stake by queering art history, exploring a history of LGBTQ identity through art history, and pairing artists with this facet of their identity. Visit us on Instagram @phillipscollection to learn about some queer artists in our collection.

Why should a museum like The Phillips Collection focus attention to queer art and artists?

What is at stake by queering art history, by exploring a history of LGBTQ identity through art history, and by pairing artists with this facet of their identity?

The works within the Phillips’s permanent collection don’t necessarily shout “gay” to a viewer. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, and Charles Demuth, who gained notoriety even in their lifetimes for the frank, sensual depictions of same-sex desire are represented in the the Phillips’s collection; however, their artworks in the collection don’t address any of those themes. Other artists, such as Zilia Sánchez, Howard Hodgkin, and Whitfield Lovell, create artworks that at first can appear abstracted, solemn, and to be exploring other ideas, but they also do not exactly scream “queer.” Some artists made the decision within their lifetimes to disavow categorization by this aspect of their identity, choosing instead to push different narratives about their art-making and place in the art world. Many artists, especially in the early 20th century, preferred to have their works judged just as artworks, and rejected categorizations based on race, gender, and sexual identity (Berenice Abbott’s letter to artist Kaucylia Brooks comes to mind.). However, the impact of the art object on us as a viewer can only be enriched by acknowledging that identity plays a part in the artworks’ creation and our reading of it.

I’m always struck, when considering these types of questions, and reminded of a 1999 artwork by Harmony Hammond, titled Small Erasure #3 (not in the Phillips’s collection). Hammond spent several years compiling lesbian artists and artworks for her 2000 publication Lesbian Art in America, the culmination of decades of work attempting to fit queer women into the New York art world conversation. In the book’s introduction, Hammond references media attempts to “commodify and consume the lesbian [and her art] as chic spectacle”—the book is literally Hammond’s way to resist such consumption. Small Erasure #3 consists of a letter, one of many that Hammond received from artists who did not want their artwork in her book for fear of reprisal and art world shaming. Hammond obscured the letter’s text with eggy latex and paint, creating yellowed streaks and areas of shadow, referencing the self-erasure that queer artists were continually fighting against at the same time as art world erasure and homophobia. The piece also speaks to self-censorship that artists underwent, and to some extent might still undergo today.

Nikki S. Lee, The Lesbian Project (14), Chromogenic print, 28 ¼ x 21 ¼ in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of heather and Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC 2011

The history of art has long upheld the myths of individual genius, separated from sexuality as it best suits the historian. However, at the same time, the cultures, codes, and images of homosexuality has long been a resource for artists of all identities to push the boundaries of creating. Take the art object in the permanent collection that has the most overt depiction of same-sex desire: Nikki S Lee’s The Lesbian Project (14), created by an artist who does not claim a queer identity, but instead created the photograph as part of an ongoing exploration of cultural signifiers of various groups. Her art has received widespread acclaim for challenging the very question about the importance of identity, and assimilation. Seeing The Lesbian Project (14) in a gallery at the Phillips was probably the first time I had seen a contemporary artwork of two women kissing—and despite complicated feelings about the project and artist, I do feel it’s important to have images of same-sex desire in museum collections.

The definitions of queer, gay, lesbian, homosexual, identity, have all changed and remain unfixed as we grapple with new understandings of identity. And as Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer state in their tome Art and Queer Culture, inserting queer culture into the history of art forces an expansion of the boundaries of what art and history actually is. A museum’s identity is not fixed, but changes institutionally as the individuals within it evolve and uphold different ideas—why shouldn’t the art and the art history upheld by a museum change too?